Abstract
In contemporary settler societies reconciliation has emerged as a potent and alluring form of Utopian politics. Across the globe, liberal democratic settler nations, generally resistant to formal processes of decolonization, have been compelled to make new and urgent political compacts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to address the legacy of violent pasts, stabilize the present, and imagine new national futures. In former colonies of British settlement, such as Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States of America, where Indigenous peoples and settlers grapple with the pernicious and ongoing effects of colonization, ‘reconciliation’ has become a political catch cry, and public projects for transformative change have been inaugurated in its name. Here, the Utopian politics of reconciliation emerge most powerfully in the realm of public performance and are greatly bound up in a culture and economy of affect, expressing the desire for virtuous compact, unity and redemption under the sign of nation. These affective performances take us into the space of the imaginary as we seek to create mythic covenants, but they also call on the violent past. And like all Utopian forms, the politics of reconciliation in settler societies, which demand consensus and often Indigenous volition, can be rejected.
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Notes
Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal 37/38 (2012): 40–62.
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London, Cassell, 1999);
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time and the Question of Genocide’, in A. D. Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
In Australia, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established under the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991 and was charged with the mission to ‘promote a process of reconciliation between Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and the wider Australian community’. See Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991, Section 5. In 2001, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was replaced with a new private body, Reconciliation Australia. Reconciliation Australia is the current peak national organization charged with building and promoting reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. See Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Reconciliation: Australia’s Challenge. Final Report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to the Prime Minister and the Commonwealth Parliament (2000), chap. 6; Damien Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 27–8; Australian Government, ‘Reconciliation’, australia.gov.au, 9 August 2013, http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/reconciliation.
Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2012);
Penelope Edmonds, ‘“Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate”: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections’, Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.
On eudaimonic emotion see Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32–3.
Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 15.
Beth Blue Swadener and Kagendo Mutua, ‘Decolonising Performances: Deconstructing the Global Postcolonial’, in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, ed. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008), 40.
See also Linda Tuhiwei Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999);
Maryrose Casey, Telling Stories: Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander performance (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012).
On ‘temporal and spatial connections in the briel moment of the theatrical event to catalyse ethical, relational accounts of the past’, see Helen Gilbert, ‘Indigeneity and Performance’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15.2 (2013): 173–80 (176).
See for example Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power; Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, eds., Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2007); Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, eds., Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press);
Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010);
Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See for example Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds, eds., Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (New York: Routledge, 2015).
On the ‘prehistory of reconciliation’s present’, see Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, ‘Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation? First Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada’, English Studies in Canada 35.1 (2009): 1–26.
This call for apology referred to the major protest around the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s relusal to apologize to Aboriginal people for the ‘Stolen Generations’. The term ‘Stolen Generations’ refers to state-sponsored policies in the early twentieth century under which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were removed or stolen from their parents and placed in care or domestic service. See Commonwealth of Australia, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997), http://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/bringing-them-home-stolen.
Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 9.
Pauline Wakeham, ‘The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology”’, in Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012).
See also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Peter Phipps, ‘Globalization, Indigeneity and Performing Culture’, Local-Global 6 (2009): 28–48 (28).
See Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
See Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud and Nikiaus Steiner, eds., The Age of Apology: Pacing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009);
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000), 173.
On international morality, see Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). On the politics of redress, see Henderson and Wakeham, Reconciling Canada.
Anthony Moran, ‘Trust and Uncertainty in a Settler Society: Relations between Settlers and Aborigines in Australia’, in Trust, Risk, and Uncertainty, ed. Sean Watson and Anthony Moran (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Dirk Moses, ‘Official Apologies, Reconciliation, and Settler Colonialism: Australian Indigenous Alterity and Political Agency’, Citizenship Studies 15.2 (2011): 145–59.
For example, Colleen Murphy’s A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) seeks to analyse political reconciliation after conflict and the ‘establishment or restoration of democratic relationships critical to the pursuit of peacemaking globally’ (1). It does address South Africa, yet its index does not list the terms ‘Aboriginal’, ‘settler’ or ‘colonialism’. Likewise, Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts, ed. Carol A. Prager and Trudy Govier (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003) examines the ‘challenges that must be faced in the aftermath of genocide or barbarous civil wars’. Chapters traverse regions such as Russia, Cambodia, Guatemala, South Africa and Canada, yet the volume does not address the specific analytical frame of settler colonialism.
Julie Fenley, ‘The National Aboriginal Conference and the Makarrata: Sovereignty and Treaty Discussions, 1979–1981’, Australian Historical Studies 42.3 (2011): 372–89.
Meredith Gibbs, ‘Justice as Reconciliation and Restoring Mana in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process’, Political Science 58.2 (2006): 15–27;
Alistair Reese, Naboth’s Vineyard: Towards Truth and Reconciliation in Aotearoa New Zealand (Saarbrücken: Verlag, 2008).
Peter Read, ‘Reconciliation without History: State Crime and State Punishment in Chile and Australia’, in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, ed. Frances-Peters Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010).
A. Chr. (Tina) Engels-Schwarzpaul, Ross Jenner and Albert Refiti, ‘Introduction: Consensus versus Disagreement’, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 8 (2000), 4.
Pauline Wakeham, ‘Reconciling “Terror”: Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology’, American Indian Quarterly 36.1 (2012), 9.
Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 8.
Miranda Johnson, ‘Reconciliation, Indigeneity and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States’, Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.2 (2011): 187–201.
Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power, 162; Damien Short, ‘Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonisation’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26.3 (2005): 267–82 (247), cited in
Sarah Maddison, ‘Twentieth Century Australia’, in The Routledge Handbook of Settler Colonialism, ed. Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh (New York: Routledge, 2016).
William Metcalf, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Coins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 531, 500, 556.
Kiril Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual Self and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).
‘Reconciliation’, Oxford English Dictionary online; Bernard Cooke and Gary Macy, ‘Rituals of Reconciliation’, in Christian Symbol and Ritual: An Introduction, ed. Bernard Cooke and Gary Macy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109, 110.
Thomas Jefferson to William Carmichael and William Short, the US Commissioners to Spain, 30 June 1793, emphasis added. See Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–99), 6:336.
See also Paul Russell Cutright, ‘Lewis and Clark Indian Peace Medals’, Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 24 (January 1968): 160–7.
Robert J. Miller, Native America Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clarke and Manifest Destiny (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 86.
Gilliam Whitlock, ‘Active Remembrance: Testimony, Remembrance and the Work of Reconciliation’, in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, ed. Annie Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 28.
Duncan Bell, Remaking the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 9.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), xix.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Gilbert, ‘Indigeneity and Performance’, 176, cites Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26.
See Henderson and Wakeham, ‘Colonial Reckoning’, 5–7. Ian Baucom theorizes the truth event as a singularity: insofar as it appears as an exception or anomaly, it ‘demonstrates the repressed or previously unrecognizable truth of a historical situation’. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 120–1. Baucom draws his ideas of the truth event from French philosopher Alain Badiou and his work on being, truth and the subject. Cited in Henderson and Wakeham, ‘Colonial Reckoning’.
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Edmonds, P. (2016). Introduction: Performing (Re)conciliation in Settler Societies. In: Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304544_1
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